MONTAIGNE/AUSTEN ESSAY

          David Foster Wallace once wrote, "What goes on inside is just too fast and huge and all interconnected for words to do more than barely sketch the outlines of at most one tiny little part of it at any given instant", in other words we can not possibly string together enough words to say how we feel about any given subject. Wallace's quote compared to my understanding of the quote were of the same topic but were not written with the same words. This is a great example of Wallace's quote because I believe you can't say everything you want to say in words because there are too many or there are not enough, I believe this is how Michel de Montaigne wrote his essays. Montaigne's essays had techniques that were written in a stream-of-conscious way and supported Wallace's quote and understanding because I feel that Michel de Montaigne could have written more in his essays on any given topic.


          Montaigne's stream-of-conscious essays and Wallace's "I can't put everything into words" quote provides a window into possibly how everybody thinks. Montaigne wrote essays from Glory to Experience to Cannibals, he ranged in many different topics in his essays that he wrote 3 books varying 107 chapters that were published. Essays want you to elaborate on a subject or question because you can't answer the topic or question in just one sentence. I feel that Montaigne essentially couldn't put all his thoughts in sentences/ words that he had to write essays on how he felt. Wallace's quote relates to Montaigne's essays because it's exactly that.

Comparing these two works to Jane Austen's style in Pride & Prejudice are very distinct but also very alike. Austen wrote with a style of parody, burlesque, irony, free indirect speech, and realism. Montaigne wrote with rhetoric, structure, and stream-of-conscious. Wallace was a  novelist, short story writer, essayist. If we were to compare Montaigne's essays and Wallace's quote to Austen's book "Pride & Prejudice", they all wrote in different times so there is difference in diction. One similarity that I believe they all pieces of works have is that they all question how we think. Did i possibly have enough words to say how I felt about this subject?